If you want to read this entire blog, fill in your username, the usernames of anyone else living in your household, the breed of dog you have and whether he/she is neutered, and your password, which should consist of an original short story in which no e’s or i’s are used. And you must tell me which one of the Beatles I’m thinking of right now.
That, of course, is a joke. The extremes to which some Web sites are going to, all in the name of security, are not jokes.
The intentions are good, I’m sure. Software designers want to save you and themselves from the expense and loss of time that comes when a hacker breaks into your system and steals the database that catalogs your Marvel comic book collection.
Personally, I’d be happy to distribute about 98 percent of what’s on my hard drives to the American Hackers Association (A-HA!Motto: “We steal your data so you don’t have to worry about losing it.”) All I ask in exchange is that I never again in my life have to enter another password.
The information any hacker could steal from my PC or that any virus could destroy is not nearly as valuable as all the work time I’ve lost trying to guess passwords I haven’t used in months and answering the trick questions that are supposed to prove I’m me. (I particularly find it irritating when the password program tells me I don’t know the name of my first pet.) But worst of all is trying to make out some nonsense word hidden in what looks like a plate of spaghetti dropped on a granite floor in order to prove I’m human.
Some security measures are nothing more than acts of pure sadism. Every time I install a program, I’m asked if I really want to install it, as though I might be sleepwalking and sleepinstalling. Sometime a program tells me I can not do something until I get an administrator’s permission. Of course, the administrator is me, which makes it highly likely I’ll let myself continue. In an office situation, I can see this. But by now Windows 7 should have noticed I’m the only one who uses this computer and that I have administrator privileges.
It’s a wonder that the overzealous security measures spreading like a virus through the Internet haven’t sparked a revolution of computer users armed with pitchforks and flaming torches, chanting “Kill the monster! Kill the monster.”
For a monster is what security has become. In the name of protecting us, computer security has become our tyrant.
But just when it seems like retinal scans would be required before you could read your email, the situation has actually started to improve. If you haven’t already noticed, a lot of sites are adding boxes to check that keep you logged in permanently. And on other sites, if you can’t remember your user name and password, you can just fill in your Google name and password or a combination from some other site striving to become the universal keeper of the keys to all sites.
There are several programs that reveal what’s behind those asterisks and bullets that hide your password as you type it. (I’m the only person in the room; am I supposed to be hiding my password from myself.) To see what you’re hiding from you, try IE Asterisk Password Uncover. It works, and it’s free.
There is hope from other directions. In our next episode, I’ll show you some handy ways to eliminate one overzealous protection and how to automate answering those oh so annoying security questions.
For now if you simply type the date on which you lost your virginity and the middle name of the person you lost it to, you can be on your way.
